Trending Tags

Follow

About Michael J. Miller

Miller, who was editor-in-chief of PC Magazine from 1991 to 2005, authors this blog for PC Magazine to share his thoughts on PC-related products. No investment advice is offered in this blog. All duties are disclaimed. Miller works separately for a private investment firm which may at any time invest in companies whose products are discussed in this blog, and no disclosure of securities transactions will be made.

AMD Looks Forward with New Platforms

Yesterday, I attended AMD's Financial Analyst briefing in New York, where obviously a lot of focus was on the delay in shipping its quad-core "Barcelona" chip in large quantities, due to an errata affecting its L3 cache and translation-lookaside buffer. The company now is targeted a revised version of the chip for the first quarter of next year.

Most senior executives of the company apologized for the issues it has faced this year - delays in product shipments, issues with the channel, etc. - but focused on what the company did right and where it is headed. I'll let others like ExtremeTech's Mark Hachman discuss the details of what happened, as well as the company's financial projections.

What I found most interesting were a couple of new demos, and the roadmap, which featured an expanded focus on "platforms" instead of just chips.

In addition to the Spider platform for enthusiasts introduced earlier, AMD's Mario Rivas, executive vice president, discussed Puma, an upcoming notebook platform, Perseus, a new platform designed for commercial desktops; and Cartwheel, designed for mainstream consumer PCs. This emphasis is a bit of a change for the company, which thus far seems to have been content to have its processor chips or graphics chips paired with other chipsets. If AMD can prove a combination of its processor, graphics, and chipsets can indeed work better together, that could help the company regain some momentum, though of course, the company will continue to support its products going in more open mixed platforms (i.e., machines with AMD processors and nVidia graphics; or Intel processors and ATI graphics.) Whether either Intel or AMD can create the best value propositions for desktops or notebooks with an integrated platform remains an open question, but it sounds like both companies will try this more in 2008.

Other highlights of the roadmap include the next generation server processors, with Shanghai, a 45nm version of Barcelona due in 2008, followed by Montreal, a 4 or 8-core chip in 2009. Perhaps most intriguing is "Swift" , which plans to take some of the company's upcoming "Stars" CPU cores and combine it with a GPU, memory controller, cache, and PCI Express. This is set to be the company's second 45nm product, and is due in the second half of 2009, and would appear to be the first mobile product to come out of the "fusion" project AMD has been talking about since acquiring ATI; the company is now calling these "accelerated processing units (APUs)".

A couple of the demonstrations stood out: a Puma reference design showed how the two cores in a notebook could be running at different speeds, thus potentially saving power. And a hybrid graphics demonstration showed how integrated graphics and discrete graphics could work together, potentially allowing cheaper dual-GPU setups.

In general, the overall focus seems to be not on raw performance by itself, but instead on energy-efficiency, platforms, and cost-effective solutions. Of course, on all of this, we don't know how well it will work until real products arrive. But it's always good to see competition.

Automatic Renewal Program: Your subscription will continue without interruption for as long as you wish, unless
you instruct us otherwise. Your subscription will automatically renew at the end of the term unless you authorize
cancellation. Each year, you'll receive a notice and you authorize that your credit/debit card will be charged the
annual subscription rate(s). You may cancel at any time during your subscription and receive a full refund on all
unsent issues. If your credit/debit card or other billing method can not be charged, we will bill you directly instead. Contact Customer Service

//our current issue

Select Term:

24 issues for $29.99 ONLY $1.25 an issue! Lock in Your Savings!

12 issues for $19.99ONLY $1.67 an issue!

State

Country

This transaction is secure

Automatic Renewal Program: Your subscription will continue without interruption for as long as you wish, unless
you instruct us otherwise. Your subscription will automatically renew at the end of the term unless you authorize
cancellation. Each year, you'll receive a notice and you authorize that your credit/debit card will be charged the
annual subscription rate(s). You may cancel at any time during your subscription and receive a full refund on all
unsent issues. If your credit/debit card or other billing method can not be charged, we will bill you directly instead. Contact Customer Service